Real-life married couple Kathy McCafferty and David Mason as Sally Talley and her hopeful beau, Matt Friedman, in “Talley’s Folly” at Portland Stage. Photo by Mical Hutson

The most important thing I gleaned from my first live theater performance in the time of COVID – Portland Stage’s affecting production of Lanford Wilson’s “Talley’s Folly” (through Nov. 15 live, available for streaming until Nov. 22) – is that if you, like me, wear glasses, it’s important to keep breathing shallow. It’s hard to see a play when your lenses fog up.

Seriously, though, the pandemic has altered the theater-going experience, at least for now. At Portland Stage, audiences are screened and their temperatures taken at the door. There are no concessions. Mask-wearing from entry to exit is a requirement. Physical distancing dictates a maximum audience of 48 in the 286-seat theater. In a video before the show, the theater’s director, Sally Wood, runs you through protocols. When it’s all over, someone else orchestrates a staged exit so that people don’t bunch up in the aisles on their way out.

Most heartbreaking, though, is the applause. The audience this Thursday numbered barely 30. When the show’s stars, Kathy McCafferty and David Mason – in another concession to COVID, they are married in real life – took their well-deserved bows, they were met with the anemic sound of 60 clapping hands instead of a possible 572. Though the actors have expressed how good it feels to get back to work, it’s impossible that, after striving so hard for 97 minutes, they would not experience some disappointment.

That said, depending on your personal risk tolerance, the performance’s rewards far exceed the minor annoyances of COVID protocols. Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for “Talley’s Folly,” the middle installment of a trilogy bracketed by “Talley & Son” and “Fifth of July,” which chronicles the interior dramas and waning fortunes of the Talley family. Set in Wilson’s native Lebanon, Missouri, in 1944, against the backdrop of the final year of World War II, it focuses on Sally Talley (McCafferty) and her hopeful beau, Matt Friedman (Mason). Sally is 31 and quickly heading toward spinsterhood. Matt is the 42-year-old mensch who fell in love with her the previous summer and, against all odds, has come back on Independence Day a year later to ask for her hand.

Wilson was lauded for the unpretentious realism of his characters’ dialogue, and we are immediately comfortable with Sally and Matt because they seem instantly accessible. I say “seem” because they actually are not. Both fiercely protect secrets that would expose a deeply wounded vulnerability. So, they talk … and talk some more. The heart of the play is watching them deflect, joke, argue and otherwise dance around their pain, circling closer and closer to their big reveals. When they do finally come to light, it’s poignant not only because their experiences are so profoundly sad (Matt is only able to relate his in the third person), but because their avoidance of feeling them keeps them from seeing that they are perfectly suited for each other.

Mason, gangly and not believably 42, is nevertheless wonderful as the eternal optimist. By turns funny, awkward, shamelessly mugging, cajoling, prodding and determined, 30 minutes into the play you feel completely exhausted for the poor guy. Some of it can come off as silly, too, as when he posits in a mock German accent that Sally’s reticence has to do with the suspicion that he’s an agent for the Nazis. But whose courting strategies haven’t fallen flat now and then? You can’t help but like him because Mason totally gets the pathos beneath Matt’s antics.

It’s a pleasure to watch McCafferty’s Sally, who enters blustery and outraged at his presence, start to soften and melt. She is at her best in these moments of transition, as she moves through a variety of moods: alternately hardened, casually interested, charming and coquettish, scared, defensive. Some of this business can occasionally feel a bit histrionic. But by the time we learn why she is considered – to use a term of that era – “unmarriageable,” it makes sense. Her façade is ironclad, and as Matt begins to penetrate it, she is terrified at the emotional toll it might take.

It’s a credit to Wilson’s acute ear for dialogue and character that I feel as though to reveal Matt and Sally’s secrets here would be to violate their privacy. They are so clearly drawn and so helplessly human that everyone in the audience can identify with them on some level. The playwright’s language has a lovely sensitivity to colloquialisms, as when an exasperated Sally tells Matt, “You do not have the perception God gave lettuce!” It can be cleverly funny too. “When they passed out logic,” Matt says of Sally’s narrow-minded family, “everyone in the Ozarks went on a marshmallow roast.” And it can be devastating too. When Sally finally comes clean, she describes her father’s callous regard of her in her time of pain. “Dad was looking at me like I was a broken swing,” she says, and you want to cry at the rawness of the hurt there.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland.